Friday, April 03, 2015

Poetry Month: Genesis

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GenesisChapter One1 In the beginning, there was nothing,Nothing but the void and dark;which suddenly explodedfrom the singularity’s spark.2 Power poured into existence.And with it, birthed a goddess;Wild and unpredictable,Yet behind-the-scenes and modest.3 She condensed the lightest atoms,And sent them t’wards the growing border.she wore a mask of quantum;Thus hid chaos in this order.4 Guided by her unseen hand,The hydrogen crashed and collided;If they were fast, they fused in two:Helium, nuclei undivided.5 The atoms danced a billion years – And with gravity’s permission –Collapsed into a stellar cloud,And twisted the ignition.6 The first star was a beacon:“and”, t’was said, “There was light”.But the prime star soon went nova,Flinging metals ‘cross the night.7 Thus the elements danced with chaos – A fierce foxtrot, death and birth;Then the star sol scorched the heavens,And gave rise to the Earth.8 That small and rocky planetoid,The third child from its parent sun,Was rained upon with water, wet,From which the threads of life were spun.Chapter Two9 Now Chaos had her eye on earth.she quelled its crust volcanic,and brought down with her unseen handThe molecules organic.10 And with a careful nudge from Chaos,They combined into amino acids,And thus the building blocks of life were made,Underneath an ocean surface, placid.11 The Goddess, ever curious,Tinkered on the continental shelf,Until her experiments devisedA molecule that could replicate itself.12 This proto-strand of DNABecame the first single-celled creature;The first of many wondrous thingsThat this small rock would feature.13 As they went forth and multiplied,Some forms ate sunlight while some just ate,And they specialised and diversifiedInto cells which learned to conjugate.14 For solitary cells are weak,But together make a mighty prison.Behold, great monsters of the seaWhich from the depths have risen.15 Chaos, with mysterious grin,Played god of evolution;And with the waters getting full,Divined a sound solution:16 “I’ll give them arms; I’ll give them legs,They’ll crawl on land and breathe the air!I’ll graft on some the gift of flight,And soon they will be everywhere!”Chapter Three17 Thus began an age of cold-blooded kings,Of gargantuan insects and terrible lizards;Some lived on plants but most ate other things,Ripping out flesh from the guts and the gizzards.18 The periods flew by – chalk it up to cretaceous – And played out for millions of years prehistoric;Then Chaos, in ways both playful and audacious,Jostled a comet, which went meteoric.19 The end of the world came sooner than thought,But lo, not every creature was extinct:The dinosaurs’ reign had all come to naught,But in the aftermath, a furry small blink.20 For milk-making monsters who mulled the mid-night,They revelled in wake of the loss of the lizards,And grew and evolved to a decent new height,And survived the ice ages and snowfalls and blizzards.21 Then one fateful day, on an open savannah,A dominant life form began to take shape:The story oft told is it slipped on a banana;It’s hard to walk on two legs, for an ape.22 The millennia ticked by; and brains were selectedBy other lone monkeys looking for prime mates,And over the years, this process affectedThe development of some evolutionary traits.23 As their minds expanded, the monkeys grew smart:Developing math, religion, and more:Philosophy, music, politics, and art;But also murder, pollution, Suffering, and war.24 Now Chaos, who was never far away,Looked down upon the human scrimmage;And she laughed upon their work and play,For they were truly made of her image.25 It’s been billions of years since Chaos, undecided,Threw dust together and sired the Earth.Now that the whole back-story has been provided,It’s time to go out there and prove what it’s worth.

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I had an assignment to submit a mind map summarizing the origins of the cosmos for my science class. Obviously I don't know what a mind map is, but I really enjoyed writing this poem, and creating the image that I had to submit. Yay for learning new things in Photoshop!